this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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It doesn't imply that somebody did it to them. The baby was left alone by the circumnstances. It's kind of difficult to come up with as short a sentence that is reasonably possible to read without somehow using 'left alone' in it.
"Kind of difficult"
I'm not a native English speaker and I can easily come up with many alternatives that don't imply the baby was left alone purposely.
I don't think the original wording implies that at all. This is a meaning OP and others are inferring themselves.
"left" is used all the time where no one was purposely doing anything. It doesn't imply that at all.
No, it does imply that. Completely and directly. Your obstinance does not make you correct.
A baby does not have agency of its own. If I 'left my keys on the counter', you SHOULD assume someone put them there, because they didn't fucking climb up there themselves. That's how reality works, let alone the English language...
My friend's death from COVID left me saddened.
So you are saying my friend acted with some agency to make me sad in that sentence? The subject of "left alone" is unspecified but a very normal reading is that just the general situation left the baby alone, or maybe left alone by all of society. It's a pretty tortured reading to declare that the mother was intended to be the subject to that verb.
"A baby was found alone days after its mother died."
It's truly not that difficult at all.
Was the baby dead? In trying to edit out the word 'rescue' you've left a key detail ambiguous.
You refered to a human as "it", because you didn't want to say "baby" twice but the details didn't include a gender and that sentence structure didn't provide a good way to just refer to the baby once. This is commonly considered pretty dehumanizing choice of pronoun. I'd argue this is much more likely to offend people.
All this to avoid some imagined implied slight by the choice of the phrase "left alone" when there's no whiff that the subject of the verb would be the mother.
There was some eagerness to find offence at a really innocuous headline, but really it's quite a fairly straightforward headline that requires the reader to pretty much try to be offended by a particular reading of what most would consider an innocuous phrase.
Oh even better: "Baby rescued days after mother died"
So easy.
Though it does omit the detail about the baby being alone since the death. As written that could refer to just a very unfortunate family where the mother died, and then while the tragedy of the mother's death was fresh the family dealt with a separate tragedy that came close to killing the child.
Including the "alone" is pretty pertinent for the general picture.
And this entire incident is after someone managed to take offense at the concept of a baby "left alone" by a death as somehow accusatory toward the mother, which is far from a concept that I would have read into that headline.
Remember, the gripe being expressed here is that "left alone" is the action being described. You're claiming that it's hard to include all the same details without including that phrase, so let's really re-write it with the exact same details so you can see how simple it is to just change the action:
And all that can be covered in additional phrasing, but still leads with the death of the mother instead of a baby being left alone.
Get it yet?